Yannick has made it to the party. A few minutes ago, Kathleen saw him pouring a drink for one of Una’s old teachers. She also saw him greeting a neighbour at the top of the stairs, pointing out the candles. Playing host, like he’s always been here.
And now Julius, at last. He plods up the stairs one by one. His strong, bony hand grip-slides up the railing, and in his other hand, a plastic shopping bag. She meets him before he gets to the top step and takes the bag, which contains a package of smoked-ham slices and a loaf of white bread.
‘The dentist did a number on you,’ he says, cupping his dry hand to her cheek. Julius has never touched her before. ‘Is it painful?’
‘It looks worse than it feels,’ she says.
‘It’s gargantuan,’ he says. ‘You look like the Elephant Man.’
Only Julius.
She takes his elbow as they mount the last two steps. ‘Look who’s here,’ she says, pointing with her chin towards Yannick, where he’s talking to a group of women. ‘Charming the pants off Heather’s friends.’
Julius squints across the room. ‘You kept that quiet,’ he says.
She shrugs.
‘He’s still very attractive.’
‘You can’t see that far,’ she says.
‘Why didn’t you say anything yesterday?’
‘There’s nothing to say.’
‘After a thousand years,’ says Julius, peering into her eyes like he’s trying to see in the dark, ‘he just comes?’
‘Yep.’ She has no intention of saying anything about the bones, not even to Julius.
The storm begins, as storms do, with wind. It comes knuckling up the river from the south, punching through the humidity. The temperature drops and the air expands and the sky billows into pea green. The rain isn’t here yet but it’s coming, fast, and Kathleen couldn’t care less. She’s coiling the hefty, whiskery tug-of-war rope around her midriff. A dozen or so children are outside with her and in this charged, dramatic light, where the blues are bluer and the reds are redder, et cetera, even she can appreciate how beautiful these rug-rats are, these random children. She is drawn to their vitality. Their here-ness. She challenged the group of them to a tug-of-war contest and the cousin who helped move the glass case earlier is the only one ballsy enough to take her on.
She glares at him now, poised opposite her as he encircles one arm with rope. She hadn’t noticed before the flawless whites of his eyes, or that the irises are the silver-grey of pussy willow catkins in March. The summer-browned skin of this child, the thick splay of dark hair that plumes from his head. Even the buck of his two enormous front teeth. He sparkles. He radiates. Whatever. She’s going to take him down.
A few of the smaller children circle and peck at each other like overexcited ducks, then waddle inside as the wind picks up even more and the sky darkens. Kathleen itches and sweats under the rope that binds her.
The river carries a bobbing chess piece away. She is unconcerned.
A silent gesture of lightning.
‘One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi,’ slurs the cousin. It’s a challenge for him to get his esses around those paddle-like teeth.
‘Are we starting, or what?’ she asks.
‘Five Mississippi.’
‘That’s a myth, you know, counting how far away the storm is.’
The far-off rumble of thunder sounds like a heavy truck driving over an unreliable bridge.
‘Five keelometres away,’ he drawls.
‘That’s a load of BS,’ she says. A heaviness clutches at her knees. The rope feels as if it’s tightening on its own.
He takes a few steps backwards and stops, both hands gripping the length of rope between them, preparing his stance. He contemplates her with those silvery eyes. ‘Where’s your daughter anyway?’ he says.
‘Well, buddy,’ she says, ‘that’s the whole point.’
He gawks at her.
‘No one knows,’ she says. She hasn’t acknowledged this fact out loud for a very, very long time and it feels odd. Almost like when you repeat a word over and over until it loses all meaning and logic. Where. Where. Where. Where. Where.
He works his face back and forth, pondering. ‘My uncle says you’re unhinged.’
Dave. She knew it. She smiles and leans back until the rope is taut.
The kid mirrors her every move. You gotta give it to him.
‘You ready for war?’ she asks.
Digging his heels into the grass, he throws his body back, as does she. Knowing she must outweigh him threefold, at least, she thinks she’s got it in the bag, but the power emanating down the rope is no joke. With burning hands, she tosses her head back, squeezes her eyes shut and gives it all her worth. An ugly grunt bores through her clenched teeth and she doesn’t even care. She needs this win.
With each breath, her strength increases. She gains a little ground. He gains a little ground. Her toes mash into the front of her shoes. Palms hot, fingers ache and slip. She hunches her shoulders and prepares for the final blow, victory expanding from the bottom of her stomach up into her throat and then, pow! She is catapulted backwards and lands solidly on her coccyx. Her head bounces off the grass. She is stunned.
The sky churns and she watches a raindrop spiral earthbound.
The little twerp let go of the rope.
The raindrops increase, pattering her face. She waits, expecting the boy to come over and help her up.
‘Boy.’
Nothing.
‘Boy?’
The boy has abandoned her to the storm.
Blue forked lightning flashes, then once more. Its pattern lingers, burned into the dirt-grey sky. One Missi—Thunderclaps. So much for five kilometres.
She raises herself up onto her elbows and keeps her head tilted to the sky. The lightning and thunder are exhilarating and she is overcome with the sort of peace that can only exist when one is completely powerless.
She closes her eyes and feels the water kiss her face, the creases of her cheeks, her lips and down behind her ears. She could just stay here, forget the party, give herself over to this water that snakes down her scalp.
Hands grip both her shoulders, shaking her. Heather’s face, crooked with alarm, cuts into view.
‘You need to come,’ she says. She’s shivering, trying to unravel the wet rope from Kathleen’s body.
‘Stop. You’re making it worse.’ She bats Heather’s hands away. ‘Help me up first.’
Heather is quivering like a Chihuahua puppy, and everything is wet and clumsy as she struggles to yank at Kathleen with scrappy hands, pulling her in all directions. Kathleen tells her, more sharply than necessary, to stop.
‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Kathleen jerks at the rope until it’s loose enough that she can step out of its coil. She rubs the sensation back into her tailbone.
‘We had an accident,’ Heather says.
Kathleen abandons the rope in the wet grass and trots behind Heather, through the side door and into the kitchen. A food bomb seems to have detonated. Ribbons of pasta and tomato sauce, ricotta cheese and ground beef on the floor and walls, dripping like something eviscerated. Chunky shards of glass are splayed across the counter and the floor, and there are also pieces embedded in the walls. Heather has blood on her arm.
‘What happened?’ Kathleen asks. ‘You got cut?’
‘I did?’ Heather inspects herself, apparently unaware she’s bleeding. She finds the contrail of blood on her arm and twists it at the elbow to find the source. ‘I took the lasagne out of the oven. I put it on the counter and…’ Heather appears to be at a loss for words.
‘And what?’
‘Don’t yell at me.’
‘Did you throw it at the wall or something? Did Dave do something?’
‘Stop yelling.’
‘I’m not yelling.’
‘You are,’ says Heather. She licks her thumb and rubs at the cut on her arm.
‘Did you throw it?’
‘What? No.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Why would I throw a lasagne?’ Heather says. ‘Why would you even ask that? The dish just exploded.’
A few people crowd the kitchen door and Kathleen notices for the first time that there’s music playing in the other room. Something twangy. Yannick appears with a broom and dustpan and an earnest look that Kathleen would like to slap off his face.
‘Everybody out,’ she says.
‘The dish exploded,’ says Yannick.
‘So it would seem.’
‘I have never seen that before,’ he says.
‘This is impossible,’ says Kathleen.
Yannick peels a shredded string of lasagne sheet off the wall and slings it into the garbage. ‘Clearly it is not,’ he says.
Kathleen opens drawers aggressively enough that they jerk and clop against their bearings, until she finds a neat stack of blue J-cloths and tea towels, and drifts into the middle of the kitchen, wondering where to start. Heather pries pieces of glass out of the wall with the edge of a butter knife and drops them one-by-one into an aluminum pie plate, each piece of glass tinkling off the aluminum in a minor key.
Dave comes in and asks if everything is okay, but Heather sends him back out, tells him to make sure no children come in. He goes without comment.
‘You’ve got him well trained,’ says Kathleen, trying to make light. Trying to make friends again. Because it’s true, she wasn’t yelling, exactly, but neither was she speaking calmly.
Heather doesn’t respond. And then, several minutes later: ‘Do you even know how many chess pieces there are in a set?’
Kathleen is on her knees, wiping mushy pasta off the floor, wary of potentially hidden shards of glass. ‘Eh?’ she says.
‘You asked me why I didn’t count the pieces, to make sure they were all there, but do you even know how many pieces there should be?’
‘Thirty-two,’ says Yannick. He’s at the sink, filling a bucket with steaming water.
Heather looks over her shoulder to him and smiles gratefully.
‘That’s not the point,’ Kathleen says.
‘It is,’ says Heather, working at a stubborn bit of glass.
Kathleen gets up off her knees, ready to argue this point. To drive home how in the wrong she is not. But then an unfamiliar voice yells from the other room for someone to call an ambulance.
What now?
Heather, ever a mother, eyes wide, drops the butter knife to the floor and dashes—really dashes—from the kitchen. Some mothers are like that, Kathleen knows, assuming everything bad that can happen will happen to their own kid, the world full of sharp corners and long falls. Without knowing what real terror is, these mothers appropriate the unthinkable: they hoard it, possess it until it orbits them.
The few party guests who remain—several took the exploding dish as a cue to leave—are crowded around a big easy chair in the corner of the main room. At first glance, Kathleen sees a manikin sitting stiffly in the chair, which makes no sense. Rod straight, face lifeless and white as paper. It’s not a manikin, of course, it’s Julius. Julius taut and fragile.
‘Is he breathing?’ someone asks.
Yannick is knelt low between Julius’s knees, holding his wrist. Kathleen bends down next to Yannick and leans in close to Julius, so close she can smell this morning’s coffee on his breath. His eyes, dark and stunned, lock on hers. His skin is like wet dough, and his neck is blotchy and red. She gently undoes the top two buttons of his shirt. He belches softly.
‘Is it indigestion, Julius?’ This is something he suffers from, she knows.
He crinkles his eyes slightly, a strenuous yes.
‘You look like shit. You need to go to the hospital.’
‘I called an ambulance,’ comes a voice from the huddle.
‘So did I,’ comes another.
Julius whispers, ‘God, no. Call them back.’ Sweat drips off the tip of his nose.
The paramedics determine anaphylactic shock, and strap him onto a gurney with a white sheet tucked over his legs. Yannick offers to ride to the hospital with him, but Julius warns him off, so Kathleen promises to drive over there as soon as she’s cleaned up here.
The party, as the storm, is over. It lasted barely two hours. Kathleen counts the candle jars. There are thirty-nine left.
She suddenly feels heavy and drenched with exhaustion.
Dave and the kids load the wet, ridiculous game pieces into the back of his truck while Kathleen, Heather and Yannick finish up in the kitchen. An old CD player sits on the kitchen counter wheezing out a Willie Nelson song. Yannick says music will make the work go by easier.
‘Couldn’t you find better music?’ Kathleen asks him.
‘I thought you liked this.’
‘It makes my teeth hurt.’
‘Your teeth make your teeth hurt,’ he says.
‘Pah.’
‘We could play it in the truck,’ he says. ‘Good music for the long road.’
Kathleen doesn’t bite. She wrings out a J-cloth slimy with cheese and tomato sauce, and refreshes the cloth with scalding water. Yannick has got another thing coming if he believes she’ll tolerate five thousand kilometres with him. She scrapes stubborn cheese off the counter with her fingernail.
Willie Nelson can’t wait to get back on the road again.
‘You must have something more upbeat than this,’ she says.
Dave leans in through the side door. ‘We’re done,’ he says, looking directly at Heather, as if there’s no one else in the kitchen.
‘I’ll drop her home later,’ Kathleen says.
‘Or,’ he says, ‘she comes with me now. We’re done.’
Heather abandons on the floor a brown paper bag grinding with pieces of glass. ‘Time to go,’ she says.
Dragging the cooling cloth across an already-clean counter, Kathleen mutters something about Dave’s orders being followed or else.
‘Sorry?’ Heather says.
Kathleen stops and leans against the counter, and twists the cloth tightly in her fingers. ‘You two,’ she says.
Heather is poised, unmoving, in the middle of the kitchen. Dave is in the doorway with his beefy shoulder wedged against the frame. One small pair of arms is wrapped around his leg, trying to coax him outside.
‘You two, what?’ she says.
‘You just. It’s like, come on.’ Kathleen, caught now, not even sure what she wants to criticize. Just itching for a fight, any fight. Yannick is looking at her with a face that’s telling her to shut the hell up.
‘What are you trying to say, Kathleen?’ Heather asks. Her chin is raised.
Dave’s face hardens with pride. Evidently this is something he has been waiting for.
‘What I am saying,’ says Kathleen, wholly unsure of what she is saying, ‘is that you, you married people—’
‘You married people? You married people, what?’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Kathleen mutters.
Heather stares at her a second longer, words in her mouth, for sure, just lapping there at the edge, but then she just kind of gives up, deflates. She moves to Dave and puts her hand on his chest. ‘I want to go home,’ she says.
‘No,’ Dave says, ‘I want to say something.’
Kathleen turns to him. Here’s her fight, at last. ‘So?’ she says.
The arms around his leg pull harder, nearly dislodging him from the doorframe, but he holds fast, his eyes on Kathleen’s. ‘We’ve had it. She’s had it with you, taking advantage.’ He looks to Heather, who’s looking at the floor. ‘You’re an asshole, Kathleen,’ he says. ‘And you ask for too much.’
What can she say to that?
‘And this,’ he says, waving his one free hand around.
‘What, this?’
He frowns. ‘This party,’ he says, with no party in the word ‘party’. Now he’s looking at the floor too. Fightwise, this isn’t shaping up to be one for the books.
The child is now leeching up Dave’s back, pulling herself up by the collar of his shirt. Dave twists and takes the little girl into his arms, cradles her. Swings her high then pulls her back into the protective shell of his body, engulfing her so all Kathleen can see of her is some tangled brown hair, a tiny clutching hand and one sandalled foot. She’s giggling maniacally, gulping for breath. This giggle, secure and confident and totally oblivious, is a horse’s swift kick to Kathleen’s gut.
‘Bye, Yannick,’ Heather says flatly.
‘Bye, now,’ he says.
‘Bye, Kathleen,’ she says.
Kathleen turns away.
No one left now but Kathleen and Yannick. And also Willie Nelson, woefully and straight from the back end of the nose, warning mamas not to let their babies grow up to be cowboys.
‘Please turn that fucking music off, Yannick.’
Which he does, mercifully. He picks up the bags containing much of the uneaten food and unused paper plates. ‘It’s going to be okay, Kathleen,’ he says.
He packs the bags and boxes of candles into the trunk of her car with careful logic, so that everything fits snugly and doesn’t jangle around, as if he’s neatly pencilling letters into one of his crossword puzzles.
There’s something about a man packing the trunk of the car for you.
There just is.
Julius is tucked up in one desolate bay of the Emergency Department, hidden behind a pale yellow curtain. He’s not in the bed, but instead sits up in a tall-backed vinyl chair, a starchy hospital sheet folded over his knees. An IV taped to his inner arm means he no longer looks like a dead person.
Kathleen sits on the edge of the bed, facing him.
‘I ruined Una’s party,’ he says. He picks delicately at the corner of his nostril with his pinkie finger. The air smells sour, and Kathleen is pretty sure it’s him.
‘Let’s face it, Julius,’ Kathleen says.
‘There wasn’t much to ruin,’ he says, looking at her warmly.
She nods, and then, ‘They’re keeping you overnight?’
‘One of these people—you can’t tell who’s the doctor who’s the nurse these days—has insisted. In case of further reaction.’
‘Do you know what caused it?’ she says, and pours him a cup of water.
He lifts his shoulders in a faint shrug, refuses the water and inhales deeply. He lets his eyes fall to half closed and exhales a weak little yodel.
A small scratch, inconvenient as a fishbone in the throat, jabs at Kathleen: the knowledge that this dear man, the only friend she has left, will, sooner rather than later, leave her too.
She asks him where his glasses are. Another shrug.
‘How strange,’ he says, his eyes now fully closed, ‘to have seen Yannick today.’
‘There were plenty of people there today that we haven’t seen in a while,’ she says.
He opens his eyes. Binds her with them. ‘He’s incredibly lonely,’ he says.
‘That man has never been lonely a day in his life.’
‘Incredibly lonely.’
Julius has always had a soft spot for Yannick, Kathleen knows. A crush.
‘He told me,’ he says, ‘about what they found out there. The bones and everything.’
‘I thought he might.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Tell you?’
He nods.
‘Because it’s not her.’
‘And you’re certain of that, how?’
‘Julius.’
He raises his hands, an apology. One of the reasons he is such a good friend. Lines even he won’t cross.
‘He wants to take me on a wild-goose chase out west.’
Julius sits up straighter in his chair, interest piqued. ‘Oh?’ he says. ‘He didn’t mention that.’
‘It’s ludicrous.’
‘Says she,’ he says, referring, no doubt, to Kathleen’s many trips out west in the first decade-plus of Una’s disappearance.
She tells him about the DNA test and the buried tooth. She tells him about Oliver Hanratty. She tells him that, even though it’s irrelevant, she’s leaving Una’s baby tooth where it is, under the Miss Pepper phlox, where it’s safe.
Julius says nothing for ages. It’s possible he’s fallen asleep, so Kathleen lifts her purse from the end of the bed and hooks the strap over her shoulder as she rises to leave. This day has taken everything out of her, as she suspected it would, and she wants to go to bed.
‘Did Una ever do one of those helium balloon fundraisers at school?’ he asks. His voice is croaky.
‘Eh?’ She sits back down.
‘It’s a charity thing. School children go door-to-door, begging sponsorship for helium balloons. They tag the balloons with their names and addresses and send them off into the sky. The idea is to see how far the balloons travel, to find out where they land. The hope is someone far away will find a grounded balloon and get in touch.’
‘I don’t know, maybe she did something like that.’
‘I heard the most peculiar story recently, on the radio,’ he says, ‘about a little girl who took part in this fundraiser. She sent a bunch of balloons off, they all did it together at school, and a few weeks later she receives a letter from another little girl who lives hundreds of kilometres away. A balloon snagged in a tree in her backyard.’
Kathleen nods. The image of a balloon swirling up into an endless sky fills her head.
‘Both girls, sender and receiver of said balloon, have the same name. Born in the same month of the same year. Both have brothers named Ted, or something like Ted. Maybe it was Brad. Anyhow, there are other, less impressive, similarities. They both favour the colour red, and kittens over puppies, what-have-you.’
Kathleen continues to nod.
‘They’ve decided they’re going to be best friends for ever.’
‘That’s what little girls do.’
‘They think they’ve been chosen, singled out,’ he says. ‘They believe that they’re special. Only the thing is, they’re not.’
‘They’re not?’
‘They’re not. No one is.’
‘On that point, I would agree.’
‘You’re not listening. You agree because you happen to dislike most people, but this is a matter of statistics. Anything you can think of, from the mundane to the absurd, is bound to happen to someone somewhere. No one is special.’
‘Julius, I’m tired. I’ll pick you up in the morning.’
‘Stay five more minutes. And pass me that water.’
A man pushing a cart pokes around the curtain and asks Julius if he would like a cheese sandwich. This man has the wormy look of one who only works the nightshift.
Julius closes his eyes, slowly, considering the sandwich, and finally tells the man no, thank you. With his eyes still closed, he continues: ‘If you’re standing at the side of a field of grass, and a single raindrop lands on a single blade of grass, you would think nothing of it. The drop has to land somewhere, right?’
‘Are you asking me?’ says the man with the cheese sandwich.
Julius opens his eyes. ‘Sorry, no.’ He looks at Kathleen and the man pushes his cart away. ‘It has to land somewhere, right?’ Julius repeats.
‘Sure.’
‘But what if you are that blade of grass in the field, among countless others, and that one raindrop, the only one, lands directly on you? You would conclude that Fortune has chosen you—for good or bad. And who could blame you? Of course you would think that you were special.’
‘Why are you talking like the wise best friend in a movie?’
‘Go on your wild-goose chase,’ he says.
‘You’re delirious.’
‘Bring me back a souvenir.’
‘Shut up,’ she says. And gives his bony knee a squeeze, a good and loving squeeze.
It could be that the party was a flop, or it could be that she’s fresh out of painkillers, but Kathleen flounders through another bad night’s sleep, and pours herself out of bed at five a.m. There’s a new flavour to the pain in her empty socket, something novel, possibly something to be worried about. She ignores this.
A quick slurp of hot coffee as she changes the number on the fridge from 7969 to 7970, the thick black marker squawking at her, and she’s out of the door by five thirty, preparing for the day’s harvest. A patch of cockscomb celosia are ready for the clippers, as is a section of zinnias. She has an order to fill that includes black-eyed Susans, delphiniums and cosmos, and she’ll have to push the zinnias hard so they don’t go to waste. She needs Heather today, but is damned if she’s going to pick up the phone.
This time of the morning? At this time of year? Bliss. Everything is washed out and lemony, soft. The birds are supremely birdy. At the wash station, Kathleen rinses her buckets in a solution of water, liquid detergent and bleach. If bacteria are present in the buckets, where the flowers will sit in water until they’re delivered, the bacteria will be absorbed by the freshly cut stems and they won’t draw water as efficiently. To this end, she also sterilizes her clippers. Every detail.
She scrubs everything with a rough brush, then rinses and scrubs again. As much as she scrubs, and rinses, and repeats, here is Yannick, taking up space in her head. He didn’t say when he was leaving—she assumes today—and she just wants him gone. And wonders if he’ll call to say goodbye.
When her business began to grow, when she quit the IDA ten years ago so she could grow flowers full time, she invested in the wash station and the cool house. Her cool house is no great shakes, just a ten-by-twelve-foot refrigerated shed she bought second-hand from a grocery store, and the wash station is nothing more than two industrial sinks and a wooden counter underneath a lean-to against the back of her house, but it’s a set-up that works. It’s clean and orderly. Her tools are well looked-after and the cool house keeps her flowers fresh for at least a day and a half before delivery. Over this, she has total control.
She looks around at what she’s built and feels a sense of protectiveness that she hasn’t experienced in a long time.
A house sparrow is warbling louder than the rest. He sounds worried, like a rusty swing getting faster and faster.
Even if she wanted to go on this…trip she cannot leave her farm.
She wraps the middle and index fingers of her left hand with white medical tape and begins with the delphiniums, selecting the stems where the bottom quarter of the flowers have opened. These particular blooms are an eye-catching, metallic periwinkle with shots of deep cobalt blue. They’re practically luminescent and their pistils look like bees.
Sometimes, when she’s doing this work, sometimes this is all there is. Colours so pretty you almost can’t believe it. The smell of the dirt, the worms and the bugs and the mulch and the flowers, and the reassuring sun settling on her shoulders. This work binds her to the earth when the loss gets too big. When, like one of Julius’s balloons, she’s in danger of floating into oblivion.
Loss can do that. Cut the tether. Watch it go.
It’s failing to help, though, this morning. The work isn’t helping. She’s distracted. Instead of pretty colours and wholesome smells and all that, the only things on her mind are Yannick and these stupid, stupid bones. It’s not going to stop her, though; the flowers don’t care. She goes in for the delphiniums. It took her years to perfect the harvest cut. She cuts each stem with her dominant hand, while holding it with the other, then flips the stem upside down, pinching it between her ring and pinkie fingers. She then strips the foliage with the thumb and index finger. She can hold up to twelve stems in her two fingers and still strip foliage, and this way she doesn’t have to stop with each cut to put a flower in the bucket. She used to drop flowers and damage them, wasting time. She used to get flashing cramps in her fingers, and get angry, and be covered with sores and minuscule, painful slits, like paper cuts, but now harvesting is an act that is both thoughtless and all-consuming. Perhaps a different kind of oblivion, then.
She’s dropping stems today, though. And splitting them. Her wrists feel achy and vulnerable. She has to stand and stretch more than usual, her lower back and shoulders and neck. Even her sunhat, a dozen years old, soft and faded to no colour, feels tighter than it should.
She grinds through the delphiniums and carries the buckets, one at a time, to the cool house. Maybe she’ll have a quick smoke before moving on to the cosmos. Ah, cosmos. The flower farmer’s bread and butter.
She comes out of the cool house, lighting up, and Yannick is standing there, picking at the peppergrass patch. He pulls out a long stalk and rubs the seeds between his fingers.
‘Smoke break?’ he says.
‘I thought you would’ve left already,’ she says.
‘I’m dropping the truck at a garage for a once-over,’ he says. ‘Then I’m gone.’
It’s irksome to her, how well she knows this man, how much he has changed and how exactly the same he is. The bow to his small legs, almost childlike in a pair of faded jeans, which are probably the only pants he owns. The long slope of his forehead, the angle of his neck and shoulders, still strong and broad, a little out of proportion to the rest of him. And just the way a person stands. This is how Yannick stands.
‘I guess I wanted to say goodbye before I leave,’ he says. ‘You got time?’
She’s got rows of flowers ready to be cut, that’s what she has. Not time. Not a second, not for this.
‘And I wanted to check you’re okay and all that,’ he says. ‘I figure yesterday did not go the way you wanted it to.’ He runs his fingers through the tall peppergrass, pulling and releasing it into a reluctant sway.
She is suddenly aware of how sweaty her hair is, how it falls in greasy hanks from under her sunhat, or of how fat and pale her knees are, like undercooked bread rolls.
He picks another stalk of peppergrass, snaps it in two, chews on the end, winks at her and does a little chuck-chuck sound out of the corner of his mouth, like he’s spurring a horse. ‘Tastes good,’ he says, ‘sweet.’
‘It is,’ she says.
‘How’s Julius?’ he asks.
‘He’ll live.’
‘How’s the tooth?’ he asks.
She tongues the gap, which aches very badly. ‘The tooth is gone,’ she says.
‘Kathleen, you know what I mean. How is the pain?’
‘Painful.’
Yannick puts his hands on his hips and takes a few steps alongside her perennial beds. She waits for him to make some sort of comment about how surprised he is, or impressed, by how well she’s done, considering. Look what you’ve built, he’s going to say. Something patronizing like that.
‘What are those ones over there,’ he says, pointing, ‘those yellow ones down there that look like my grandmother’s swimming hat?’
‘Zinnias.’
‘Zinnias,’ he says, puckering his lips. Nodding. The peppergrass still bobs from his mouth.
‘Yannick. I’m sorry I’m not going on this trip with you.’ She means this; she’s not just saying it.
‘Why the hell not?’ he says. ‘Why wouldn’t you?’
Jesus. She walks back across the yard to the house, up the porch steps and into the kitchen. She plucks an apple out of the fruit bowl by the window and scrambles in the drawer for a paring knife. Peeling the apple at the sink, she lets the peel fall in one long and jerky spiral, hoping maybe he will just leave. Knowing he won’t.
Back outside, Yannick is sitting on the bottom porch step so she sits there too. She slices a translucently thin white disc off the apple and eats it with the same hand that holds the knife, letting the slice fall apart on her tongue because she can’t chew it.
‘I could get us there in six days if we only stop to sleep,’ he says.
‘Why not just fly?’ This is unfair to suggest (Yannick is afraid of very little, but he will not get on an aeroplane), but she’s not in the mood to be fair.
‘I’ve got a tank full of gas,’ he says, ignoring her snark.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘It would do you good.’
‘Don’t do that,’ she says.
He stares at his hands, worries at the cuticles of his thumbs with his middle fingers. This too, this tic. This is what Yannick does. ‘You will do the test?’ he says, looking at her with his face downcast, his eyes raised over the top rim of his grubby glasses. Either she is being scolded or warned. Neither is okay.
‘I will,’ she says. ‘I promise.’ She taps out the sign of the cross with the knife, and slices another crescent off the apple, claps it onto her tongue with the blade and lets it kind of fizzle there.
He’s still looking at her.
‘I’ll call and make an appointment,’ she says. ‘Wherever it is I’m supposed to make an appointment, I’ll call. Tomorrow.’
‘Aren’t you even curious?’ he says. ‘I would be there right now if I could, right now, today.’
‘Where they—?’ She stops, doesn’t know what to call it.
‘The bones place. I thought you might feel the same.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Well.’
‘Anyway, I can’t leave my farm,’ she says. She can, though, leave. It’s nearly August, and August is a slow month. Wedding season is virtually over. People have flowers growing in their own gardens and the florists and grocery stores keep their stocks to a minimum. If she were to go away at any time of the year, this would be it. ‘It’s impossible,’ she says.
‘What about your gal? Your girl Heather?’
She gives him a look.
‘Fair enough,’ he says.
She comes to a bruise in the apple, begins to cut around the gamey flesh. ‘Why don’t you ask Sunny?’
‘Because I am asking you. You’ve still got that number on the fridge, Kathleen. There is something wrong with that.’
‘Driving across the country won’t fix diddly-squat.’ She flings the excised pulp into the grass.
Yannick looks a little heartbroken. A little hope-dashed. He has always been a sensitive man, a real empath. He takes things, other people’s feelings, that don’t belong to him, and he feels them too. But he will not take the number from her fridge. It belongs to her.
‘I’m losing half a day here, Yannick. My cosmos are beginning to senesce.’
He looks at her with one eyebrow cocked.
She heaves herself up from the porch step. ‘They’re dying.’
He gets up too, brushes the seat of his jeans and smoothes his thin hair back from his ears. Pats his jeans pockets searching for his keys. He looks at her again and his eyes behind the drugstore old-man glasses are looming. ‘Okay, then,’ he says.
‘Okay, then.’
‘We’ll keep in touch, though, eh? About the test?’
‘You’ll turn back, won’t you?’ she says.
‘Eh?’
‘Well, what if I do the test and you’re halfway to wherever and it isn’t her? You’ll turn back.’
‘Right,’ he says, still patting his jeans pockets, still looking for his keys. ‘Yes.’ He hovers there just one moment longer, too long, then goes, crosses the lawn back towards where his truck is parked. She must have built him up in her mind, over time: he looks smaller than he should. Something is missing from him.
He stops in the middle of the yard, roughly the same spot as nineteen years ago, if, Kathleen thinks, memory serves. He turns back to her, raises both hands up by his face defensively, feigns a dodge, like she’s about to throw a glass ashtray at his head. He chuckles, sadly, and she does too. He can be pretty funny, Yannick.
A can of mushroom soup for a late lunch. Kathleen is tired; her hands are tired. Even opening the can of soup feels heavy and seems to take an age.
Julius calls from the hospital to tell her they’re keeping him for at least another day because he still has, in his words, the shits and dehydration. Minutes after she hangs up, the phone bleats again. All she wants to do is heat up her soup and eat it, but she could never ignore a ringing phone. Could be anyone.
‘Hi, Kathleen. It’s Sally,’ says Sandra Hoffstead.
‘I’ve already paid what I owe for the hall,’ Kathleen says. Fine silver steam wisps up from the pot of mushroom soup.
‘That’s not why I’m calling.’
‘Oh?’
‘We’re wondering what happened to the display case? Why it was moved?’
‘That glass box thing?’
‘Several irreplaceable items have been destroyed.’
As much as she would love to challenge Sandra’s notion of irreplaceable, she thinks it smarter, at this moment, not to. ‘It was in the way.’
‘You didn’t see the damage? All the broken pottery?’
‘I didn’t expect it to be so flimsy. I’m sorry.’
Sandra’s shallow, indignant breaths beat down the phone line. Kathleen stirs her bubbling soup so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pot.
‘We also have to discuss the damage to the walls in the kitchen,’ Sandra says.
‘Uh-huh.’ Kathleen stirs.
‘And to the whiteboard by the front desk.’
‘Give me a break, Sandra.’
‘What the heck happened in the kitchen? There are all these gouges in the walls? This morning I picked cheese off the ceiling fan. It took me half the morning to get that cheese off.’
Kathleen explains how Heather exploded the lasagne and asks what’s wrong with the whiteboard by the reception desk.
‘You wrote on it in permanent marker.’
‘Oh.’
‘The kind that doesn’t wipe off.’
‘I know what permanent marker is.’
‘Apparently you don’t.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I had to throw it in the garbage.’
The mushroom soup suddenly comes alive, bubbling and foaming and blurbing over the edge of the pot like something primordial. Kathleen slides it off the heat.
‘We haven’t worked it out yet formally but the cost of repairing the walls alone is going to run us—you—upwards of a thousand dollars, with the painting and everything. There’s also the replacement and mounting of a new whiteboard, and replacement of the shelving in the display case.’
‘I thought you said that was irreplaceable.’
‘The pottery. The pottery, Kathleen, not the case. I knew you’d be like this.’
‘Like what?’
Sandra doesn’t answer.
‘I’m not giving you a thousand dollars,’ says Kathleen. ‘You must have insurance for this kind of thing. It was a party. Things get damaged.’
‘You’re paying for this, Kathleen. You’re not talking your way out of it.’
With the phone tucked under her ear, Kathleen pours the soup into a bowl, spilling half of it on the counter, slopping some on her hand. ‘You know what?’ she says. ‘This is real community support here. I can really feel the love.’ She goes to the sink, turns on the cold water and thrusts her burning hand into the stream.
‘Please, Kathleen, stop.’ Sandra’s voice is exhausted.
‘What?’ she says. ‘Stop what?’
‘We’ve all had it.’
‘We who?’
‘And wherever Una is,’ Sandra says, and sighs, ‘well, I’m willing to bet she’s had it, too.’ Sandra is silent, her silence as heavy and thick as liquid concrete pouring from the spout, the sound of someone realizing they’ve gone too far. And then she hangs up.
Kathleen lets the phone fall from her shoulder to the floor. She turns her hand under the water, the red welt now appearing on the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger. Her pulse hammers through her body, mostly in her mouth. She holds her hand under the water until it’s numb, then turns and leans against the sink, holding her hand in a loose fist against her chest. The number on her fridge throbs as if it wants to suck her in.
She goes upstairs to Una’s bedroom door. She does this on occasion, less now than before, but still. She opens the door, stops and leans against the frame, doesn’t pass the threshold. She opens her eyes widely to the dim and sees that nothing is different. The dust is abundant and the air is stale. The bare mattress sags on the bed, the curtains are half closed. In this room, it’s always twilight. Most of Una’s things were packed into boxes in the basement years ago but the full-length mirror remains on the wall; some loyal books still hold each other up on the bookcase, painted purple, which Una did herself. You can still see a line of purple paint in the carpet if you know where to look. The lamp she’d had since she was a baby is still on the desk. Nothing special about it other than that it’s still here. Maybe it works and maybe it doesn’t. Kathleen has that feeling again of repeating a word over and over, losing its meaning.